Mikis Theodorakis, the renowned composer and iconic figure in modern Greek Resistance movement against the brutal Axis armies that had occupied Greece. Prominent members of the left then fuelled by revolutionary fervour in the Square that day who, like the 16-year-old Patrikios, would go on to become ![]() Restoration, he switched allegiances to back the supporters of Hitler against Jeopardise his plan to return the Greek king to power and keep Communism at Stronger than he had calculated, sufficient to Influence of the Communist Party within the broad resistance movement he hadīacked throughout the war – National Liberation Front, EAM - to have grown Was brutal and perfidious: Prime Minister Winston Churchill considered the “We had all thought it would be aĭemonstration like any other,” Patrikios recalls. Their blood was drawn not by the Germans, but from British sniper nests and by security forcesĪligned with the British who had served the Third Viva Stalin', in endorsement of the wartime alliance.Ĭivilians, mostly young boys and girls, were killed and hundreds injured. The crowd carried Greek,Īmerican, British and Soviet flags, and chanted: 'Viva Churchill, Viva Roosevelt, Whom Britain had been allied for three years. To fire upon – a civilian crowd demonstrating in support of the partisans with With Germany, opened fire upon – and armed Greek collaborators with the Nazis Of Greek political life, on the morning of December 3, 1944.ĭay, those seventy years ago this Tuesday, when the British Army, still at war Remember, scene-for-scene, shot for shot, what happened on the central square “laughs at and with myself that I have reached such an age”, the poet can Nor has it dented his recollection of events. Years may have passed but time has not diminished how Titos Patrikios felt thatĭay. What had happened would not change the history of a country that, liberatedįrom Adolf Hitler’s Reich barely six weeks earlier, was now surging headlong But there was no winning that day just as there was no pretending that ![]() Was,” he says now, “absolutely sure, profoundly sure, that we were going to There, and I began to shout: “Comrades, don’t disperse! Victory will be ours!ĭon’t leave. Jumped up on the fountain in the middle of the square, the one that is still ![]() Then came the defining moment: the recklessness of jeunesse, the passion of belief in a justice burning bright: “I The young men and women lying in pools of blood,Įveryone rushing down the stairs in total shock, total panic.” “the police firing on the crowd from the roof of the parliament at the top of Film from Pathé News.Ĭan still see it very clearly, I have not forgotten,” says Titos Patrikios
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